- Americans are still decent people: I called Ted Kennedy’s office yesterday morning, and the woman on the phone said that they had gotten "thousands" of calls about the people at the NO convention center.
- Did Robert Siegel save lives in staying on Michael Chertoff’s ass on Thursday?
- Boston Scores, a terrific sheet music store on Newbury Street run by good folks Cliff and Judith Rust, is sadly going out of business. Joel Brown at HubArts has the story. Sad news — go by 223 Newbury Street and get some music at a big discount.
- Massachusetts is giving Microsoft the boot, moving to the open-source OpenOffice suite of programs and requiring all documents to be platform-neutral pdf’s. I’ve used OpenOffice — it’s a decent suite, and I don’t imagine the change will be that disruptive — except to Microsoft. Appropriate, too, since Massachusetts is the cradle of Free Software (free as in speech, not as in beer.) Thanks to esteemed commenter stomv for the steer.
Please share widely!
Massachusetts is giving Microsoft the boot.I’d like to put in a plug here for OpenOffice. I recently made the switch, and it was completely painless. In fact it was pleasant, because there are a couple of formatting features in OO that make me prefer it over Word.Download and install, and you’re in business immediately. OO opens Word documents directly and can save in that format too, if you have the need. (The spreadsheet module can similarly work with Excel files.)I’m in the middle of writing my thesis, so I was not looking forward to changing software in midstream. But I did, and I have been extremely happy and impressed for the six weeks or so that I have been using it. I wish I would have done it a long time ago, but I was (absolutely needlessly) nervous about the quality of OO.I’m planning on getting rid of Windows itself next, but that’s going to have to wait until AFTER the thesis is finished.
I’ve been using Open Office for at least a year. No complaints.